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Masterpiece
HOW TO BECOME A MASTER
It actually becomes quite entertaining, picking out all the threads that connect these performers of masterpieces (which is the theme of the Festival’s Week Four, simply titled “Masterpiece”). So what do these very different masters have in common? I’ve made a list of six things that appear to be key ingredients in practitioners of masterpieces. 1) German: Jon Nakamatsu used to be a high school German teacher and is a member of the Berlin Philharmonic Woodwind Quintet; Naumburg, also a town in Germany, is the last name of the man who founded the Naumburg Award, which Sari Gruber won. Furthermore, Gruber’s vocal repertoire spans nine languages, of which German is one. 2) NPR: Stephen Copes performed during NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor; Jon Nakamatsu was named Debut Artist of the Year by NPR’s Performance Today. Neither, however, has appeared on Car Talk; I wish to take this opportunity to say that I think that would be very cool. 3) Very Important Institutions: Sari Gruber earned degrees from Yale and Juilliard; Stephen Copes holds degrees from Curtis and Juilliard; Nakamatsu graduated from Stanford (but with degrees in German Studies and Education, so it would appear that #3 can occur in any discipline). 4) Thunderstorms: Critic Rob Hubbard calls Copes’ playing “electrifying”; Amazon.com reviews Nakamatsu as “storming.” 5) Penchants for Destruction: Pioneer Press notes that Copes was essentially “shredding his bow hairs on the cadenza”; Dallas Morning News reflects on Nakamatsu’s performance as “crisply chiseled”; the Austin Chronicle reports that Gruber simply “nailed” it; and Amazon.com remarks that Nakamatsu has what it takes to play “a legendary finger-buster.” 6) Gentleness: Gruber’s “soft vocal gleam” (Opera News Online), her “wealth of tender inflections” (Charlotte Observer), Nakamatsu’s “gossamer touch” (The New York Times) and Copes’ “lyrical meditation” (Star Tribune) give us a sense of the ephemeral. So that’s how they do it. At the end of summer, when people start leaving zucchinis and tomatoes on each other’s doorsteps because bounty has inevitably become excess, it’s fitting that there should also be such an overabundance of excellence – of mastery, of masterpieces— brimming in the music world of the Finger Lakes. The Season Finale week of the Skaneateles Festival will feature a solo recital by Jon Nakamatsu, Mozart Arias sung by Sari Gruber, and masterpieces by Liszt, Beethoven, Chopin, Dvorak, Brahms, Schubert, and Debussy, among others. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit www.skanfest.org or call the Festival office at 315-685-7418. Caroline Manring teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is the granddaughter of Festival founders David and Louise Robinson.
Skaneateles Festival unafraid to be weird and wonderful I admire people who try to talk to a cactus on a tin-can phone. Find the group So Percussion’s portrait in the Skaneateles Festival brochure and just try to tell me they’re not getting something out of that conversation. Maybe if you haven’t yet looked at the trailblazing group’s website (sopercussion.com) you don’t know that there’s such a thing as “site-specific Music for Trains in Southern Vermont.” Or that one could perform a “fully-staged sonic meditation on urban soundscapes.” Or that you could call up a guy who founded something called Bang on a Can to commission a masterpiece. Those of you who may find these things mildly disconcerting: before you hang up the tin-can phone, consider for a moment that Billboard Magazine calls So Percussion “astonishing and entrancing,” and the New York Times hails them as “brilliant.” Recall, while you’re at it, that when you were a kid, the strangeness of things, the novelty of every tree and rock, made life unbearably fascinating. Meanwhile, those of you who are familiar with the music of John Cage and Steve Reich may take a moment to feel clever. [Silence.] Yes, a group called an “experimental powerhouse” by the Village Voice would live and breathe music from such great innovators. When a group works to commune with a cactus or aligns itself with famous minds, does it follow that what the group does must be esoteric and obtuse? Absolutely not. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that “esoteric” means “communicated or intelligible only to the initiated,” and I would argue that there is absolutely no one who lacks rhythm, and therefore no one uninitiated. You may not be anyone’s first choice for a salsa partner, but you have a heartbeat, you breathe, you walk, you blink, you become entranced by the windshield wipers at inopportune moments. Let’s put this all together. First, it turns out that weirdness is full of wonder. (Since you never know what a cactus might say, why on earth wouldn’t you pick up the phone every time, just in case what comes out is brilliant?) Second, you have rhythm, which is, by the way, how you know you’re alive, so getting a wee “tune-up” in the rhythm department could really boost your joie de vivre. So Percussion during Week Three of the Skaneateles Festival has the very real potential to broaden (stretch your mind) and deepen (light your fire). Sign me up. First this, then who knows? Maybe the salsa lessons I always wanted.
Serving it up fresh at the Skaneateles Festival We’ve all heard the witticism that fine wines and women get better with age. I find that the same is true of pie and soup. Also paella. Giving things time to marinate, including, especially, adolescent male brains, is important. But after awhile, a few decades of learning such types of restraint and patience, one can begin to feel dull and daft, perpetually waiting for who-even-remembers-what. Marinate no more, my patience- and wisdom-weary friends. Sometimes, it thrills me to admit, it’s the very newness of a thing, the fact that it has not aged yet, that makes it fantastic. The East Coast Chamber Orchestra, or ECCO, is comprised of what one could describe as … hot young things. Should this notion read as inappropriate or obtuse, call up, if you will, the image of the thoroughbred racehorse, who wins his or her Kentucky Derby at the ripe old age of three. See? Hot young things. Interesting to note is that, rightfully or not, chamber music has a reputation for being the realm of the “dead white guy.” (What’s the difference between a viola and a coffin? – With the coffin, the dead guy’s on the inside.) ECCO confounds and obliterates such expectations. ECCO’s vibrancy isn’t so much the warmth and fullness that comes with age. It’s the intensity that hits you like a wall when you walk into a room of young musicians who have some seriously diamond-studded training. (OK, Paul Simon was serving up a bit of irony with “Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes,” but part of what makes that song groovy is that it’s not entirely ironic: it might actually be really cool to have diamonds on the soles of your shoes.) Having trained at Juilliard, New England Conservatory, Cleveland Institute, Peabody, Curtis, and other high-octane institutions hasn’t put a kink in ECCO members’ youthful vitality. It’s just greased the machine. The group of seventeen core soloists had its debut just last spring and basically crowd-surfed on standing ovations to get to your door. When the Philadelphia Enquirer says that “The youthful vigor of the group created a kind of heat that took the music-making to a higher or deeper place,” you don’t sit on your couch and think about it. You pick the lettuce last-minute, eat your dinner raw, and get yourself a ticket. Time is of the essence.
Skaneateles Festival tunes up for Summer 2011 at a starting line made of stars The traditional press release for an internationally recognized anything, especially chamber music group, goes something like this: “[adjective] [cool name], known galaxy-wide for [superlative] [synonym for technical virtuosity] and [something about great heart, often viscerally evocative], comes to [synonym for your back yard] [synonym for alarmingly soon], so [basically you should sprint, because tickets are vanishing faster than ice cream cones. In fact, they’re already sold out and we’re printing this just to make you mad].” And so this would be true of the Chiara Quartet, who will open the Skaneateles Festival’s 2011 Season with their signature “no-holds-barred” style and energy: they’ve got a cool name (it means “clear, pure, or light” in Italian); they play with no less than “demonic energy” (San Francisco Chronicle) and “chiseled finesse” (Strad Magazine) that makes for “highly virtuostic, edge-of-the-seat” performances (Boston Globe); they’ve performed on stages from Carnegie Hall to Rome, Seoul, Naumburg, Aspen, and Tanglewood; each member is so heavily credentialed I’m glad to hear they can still walk; and each has a technical mastery roughly equivalent to Roger Federer’s “Bottle Skill-shot” (Youtube it). And just to be super clear about how easy it would be to herald their arrival with fireworks: The Chiara won Chamber Music America’s Guarneri Quartet Residency Award, they’re Artists-in-Residence at Harvard University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and have studied and taught at the Juilliard School. They are serious champions of new music, with projects to disseminate it that are turning serious heads. They have a whole host of recordings, really neat recordings that incorporate everything from Mozart to electronic remixes. They’re world travelers who comprise a stunningly sensitive performing organism, and they perform in concert halls, museums, bars, and clubs alike. They’ve got the dazzle part down. But it’s summer, things are glorious with or without me and my garden-sore hands, and … I’m tired of being impressed. It’s a wonderful way to start, but what then? I once asked a student who was so focused on getting her “A” grade that she could hardly breathe, “what comes after the A?” She couldn’t answer. So I gave her the A right then and there for the course, and told her to go do anything she could with the rest of it. She looked scandalized, and then ravenously eager. The truth is, a lot comes after the A. (A440, you might ask? Yes, that one too.) The Chiara Quartet is proof of my theory: just being amazing and perfect, and nothing more, is so yesterday. After the A, after the fireworks and renown, what may impress and compel us in our slower, more luxuriant seasonal brains and bodies, are a few of the rarer, subtler qualities: industry, clarity, empathy, efficacy, commitment, balance. So let’s think for a moment about just how hard what they do is, partly in preparation for Week Two of the Festival, which is themed around music for stringed instruments and titled, simply, “String”. Chiropractors run the other way when they see string players coming. Physically, playing a stringed instrument is one of the more absurdly asymmetrical things one can do. Not to mention the freakish extent of the minutiae involved—in order to make a career of playing a stringed instrument, you have to start training before you’ve transitioned to solid foods. As for clarity and empathy and efficacy, just take the above and have four people do it all together in intricate combinations at high speed, with an audience of hundreds or thousands. And the players aren’t allowed to fall off their chairs. This marvelous spectacle serves, among other things, to up the ante on what community means, which works quite well since “Community” is the celebratory theme of the Opening Week of the 2011 Skaneateles Festival season. Commitment and balance are self-evident in this young, notably vital group: Rebecca Fischer, first violinist, is described at the group’s home on the web, chiaraquartet.net, as a “passionate educator”; second violinist Julie Hye-Yung Yoon is a “devoted teacher”; Jonah Sirota, violist, works hard “fighting performance related injuries” in his students, to whom he is also passionately committed (see section on asymmetry and chiropractics above); Gregory Beaver, cellist and husband of Julie Hye-Yung Yoon is “internationally recognized expert in the PHP computer programming language.” What?? These guys are super-human and human. What that means for us is that so much less is lost in that magical translation that happens on the stage. These are the people who go past the A, past the A plus, on into living, and making life richer for others, including us. So don’t miss out, because it’s a wonderful thing, to encounter the dazzling and the grounding all in one place: at the Skaneateles Festival, listening to the Chiara Quartet, we will have our cake and eat it too. Caroline Manring teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is the granddaughter of Festival founders David and Louise Robinson.
Week One: Community n., pl.-ties: 1. A group or class having common interests 2. Society as a whole; the public The Festival opens with a thrilling celebration of community. Join Festival artists each day mini “Music Blasts” throughout the community. Log on each morning to our website (or follow us on Facebook or Twitter) to find out the location and time for that day’s blast. Who knows? You might hear the captivating Chiara Quartet (known for playing “chamber music in any chamber”) at the grocery store or renowned clarinetist Alan Kay at the post office! Also this week we will close our Hyperscore II project with the Chiara Quartet interpreting music written by novice composers, members of our own community. Composer Stacy Garrop will be on hand to discuss the project and to introduce some of her own music, too. Then we’ll hear music written by two great composers for their own communities: Haydn’s string quartet, written for 18th-century musicians at the court of Esterházy, and Messian’s spectacular Quartet for the End of Time, written for himself and three fellow prisoners in the German prison camp in 1940. On Friday we’ll be treated to an evening with one of our own community stars, pianist Andrew Russo, who will weave music with a political bent together with commentary and anecdotes about his own life and journey in politics. Finally, the Festival Chamber Orchestra rounds out the week with a piece commissioned by community members Jary and Julie Shimer to celebrate the Robinson family and their commitment to this community. Also on the program will be Beethoven’s rousing Choral Fantasy, showcasing Andrew Russo on piano and the Syracuse Vocal Ensemble, followed by Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, evoking the sights and sounds of the communities Mendelssohn visited during his travels. Bring your picnic baskets this night as Brook Farm opens early for picnicking to the accompaniment of a brass pre-concert serenade from the porch. Artists: Chiara Quartet; Andrew Russo, piano; Alan Kay, clarinet; Stacy Garrop, composer; Community Composers; Elinor Freer, piano; David Ying, cello; Festival Chamber Orchestra; Robert Moody, conductor Mon. Aug. 8 Tues. Aug. 9 Wed. Aug. 10: “Music Blast” mini-concert, time and location TBA* 7:00pm Behind the Scenes: Meet composer Stacy Garrop and get an inside look at the Hyperscore II Project 8:00pm Special Event: Hyperscore Community Celebration Featuring: the Chiara Quartet; community composers of all ages; Stacy Garrop, composer; video images; Alan Kay, clarinet; David Ying, cello; Elinor Freer, piano Th. Aug. 11: “Music Blast” mini-concert, time and location TBA* 7pm Prelude Concert: Meet and Hear the 2011 Robinson Award Winner 8pm Chamber Music Concert Featuring: Chiara Quartet Fri. Aug. 12: “Music Blast” mini-concert, time and location TBA* 8pm An Evening with Andrew Russo and the Chiara Quartet Solo piano works with a political bent by Paderewski, Gottschalk, Moritz Eggert and others mixed with humorous political anecdotes and commentary Featuring: Andrew Russo, piano and Chiara Quartet Sat. Aug. 13: Community Extravaganza at Brook Farm 6:30pm Brass Quintet Prelude Concert (Brook Farm opens early for picnicking) 7:30pm Featuring: Andrew Russo, piano; Syracuse Vocal Ensemble; Festival Chamber Orchestra and Robert Moody, conductor **World premiere: Commissioned by Jary and Julie Shimer in celebration of the Robinson Family and their outstanding commitment to the Skaneateles community.
Luxuriate in the glories of string chamber music! First, superb players from the conductorless East Coast Chamber Orchestra (ECCO) mix it up in different combinations for an evening of masterpieces, capped off by Brahms’ sublime B-flat Major String Sextet. Then we will thrill to the sounds of the Grammy-winning Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, bringing a new energy to concert stages worldwide with their eclectic blend of styles from Bach to bluegrass. Close out your week under the stars at Brook Farm with a concert by the complete ECCO, which has performed together since 2001 and is comprised of some of the hottest young stars in classical music today: alumni of the famed Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont and members of the Borromeo, Daedalus and Jupiter string quartets, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Artists: Wed. Aug. 17: Special Event - Summer Suite Th. Aug. 18: 8pm Chamber Music Concert Fri. Aug. 19: 8pm Chamber Music Concert: Los Angeles Guitar Quartet Sat. Aug. 20 7:30pm ECCO (the East Coast Chamber Orchestra)
The Festival kicks it up a notch with a week exploring rhythm. Called an "experimental powerhouse" by the Village Voice and "astonishing and entrancing" by Billboard Magazine, the So Percussion quartet brings their edgy yet ancient breed of music to Skaneateles for the first time. Also joining us that week: the elegant percussionist and marimbist Ayano Kataoka returns to the Festival, fresh from performances at Lincoln Center and in Tokyo. And, we are thrilled to welcome legendary jazz pianist Marcus Roberts and his Trio to Skaneateles for the first time. Don’t miss the hottest ticket in town! Artists: Wed. Aug. 24: 5:30pm Special Event: A Musical Happy Hour: Free Community Concert at Anyela’s Vineyard with Kataoka/ Nelson Duo (marimba and flute) Th. Aug. 25: 8pm Chamber Music Concert: So Percussion (at the Skaneateles High School) Fri. Aug. 26: 8pm Not Your Mother’s Chamber Music Concert! (A fantastic mélange of sounds and styles) Sat. Aug. 27: 7:30pm Marcus Roberts Trio at Brook Farm Program to include jazz standards as well as Roberts’ own composition, “From Rags to Rhythm”
Stellar musicians like pianist Jon Nakamatsu (Van Cliburn Competition Gold Medalist), soprano Sari Gruber (Naumburg Competition winner), violinist Steven Copes (St Paul Chamber Orchestra concertmaster), and others close this year’s festival with a week of timeless masterpieces. For ethereal beauty, we’ll hear Schubert’s Shepherd on the Rock; for melancholy and soul, the Brahms Clarinet Quintet; for exuberant folk music, Dvorak’s Dumky Trio; for stunning melodic beauty, Villa Lobos Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5. And the list goes on! Each historic piece this week stands the test of time because of the universal human qualities it conveys. It’s the kind of music we live for. Artists: Wed. Aug. 31: 8pm Special Event: Solo recital with Jon Nakamatsu, piano
8pm Chamber Music Concert Fri. Sept. 2: 8pm Chamber Music Concert Sat. Sept. 3: 7:30pm Festival Grand Finale Sari Gruber, soloist Locations and Tickets Weeknight concert are held at various locations in Skaneateles. Thursday and Friday concerts during are held at 8:00 pm at the First Presbyterian Church, 97 East Genesee Street. Friday evening post-concert receptions are also held in the church, and are open to all audience members. The Thursday, August 25 concert will be held at the Skaneateles High School, 49 E. Elizabeth Street. FamilyFest! free family concerts are held at the First Presbyterian Church. Festival tickets are reasonably priced. Single tickets range from $16 to $30. Children under 13 may attend evening concerts for free in "B" seating, though tickets are required for all ages. Discounted season subscriptions and weekly passes are available—consider giving your summer guests the gift of music! For more information, to purchase tickets, or to obtain a complete schedule of events and performances, call 315/685-7418.
By Caroline Manring John Lennon, Bach, Imogen Heap, Arlo Guthrie, KD Lang—Time for Three, or Tf3, pretty much utters them all in one breath on their website, without really trying. That’s because they’re the real deal. This “classically trained garage band” asserts with its wood and wire (two violins and an upright bass) that there’s a definite, beautiful, and exciting place in the world for all of us “tweens”. And that’s not just an age; a “tween” could be someone between childhood and adulthood, retirement and the next project, grunge rock and bluegrass, or a handwritten letter and the text message. We all need a way to feel at home on the earth despite these competing forces, and at times the result can be giving up a little of what you love in one direction to get something in the other. But what the guys of Tf3 do is decidedly not a compromise, or cobbled together, or lost in translation, or even a synthesis—it just is its own thing. What a relief in an age of having to choose between your roots and opportunity. How does that happen? Back to the epithet “classically trained garage band.” What could that possibly mean? Well, take a kid and raise him up doing hours of finger exercises for violin and learning the difference between forte and mezzo forte or détaché and marcato. This is like giving him a strong skeleton to work with. Then send him to, say, the Curtis Institute, where he’ll build the muscles of knowledge, discipline, dedication, insight, patience… until they’re completely buff. Now he’s a perfectly polished classical player, with all the depth and strength necessary to take on Symphony Hall in any major city in the world. But don’t forget his dangerous penchant for high-speed country western fiddling, a harebrained love of the impromptu, the split-second judgment of a jazz improviser, and a relaxed, gutsy attitude that lets him and his friend stand up from the ranks of the Philadelphia Orchestra during a power outage and entertain the restless audience with “Ragtime Annie” and “Orange Blossom Special.” That’s a true story—and the crowd went absolutely wild. Now multiply all that by three, and you have Tf3: Zachary DePue and Nicolas Kendall, violin, Ranaan Meyer, bass—and the sky as the limit. Let me make first a disclaimer and then a prediction: 1) Disclaimer: if you go to their website, Tf3.com, you may, like me, end up immediately buying their “featured track,” which is a really cool arrangement of Imogen Heap’s strange, gorgeous piece, “Hide and Seek”—or, for that matter, one of their full albums; 2) Prediction (and I’ll be taking bets on this): The audience at these concerts will be unable to sit still and will holler til it’s hoarse. Your need for classical precision and grace, utterly satiated, will be able to step aside for the devilish hooligan in you, or the hopeless romantic, or the adrenaline junky, or the child who danced, completely consumed by the music and the moment at her ballet recital, or the kid who grooved beside the giant speakers in his parents’ living room—turned up loud, real loud—until his feet were sore. And that’s just part of Week One of the 2010 Skaneateles Festival. In that same spirit of timeless quality, the festival brings you America's premier piano trio, Trio Solisti, and a special visit from Paul Moravec for the performance of his phenomenal work, Tempest Fantasy. In addition to their fine musical performances, these artists will be offering a FREE FamilyFest! multimedia adventure through Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, pre-concert “behind the scenes” chats, and readings from Shakespeare to complement Moravec’s original masterpiece. To find more information, purchase individual tickets, week or season passes, or to see a full schedule of events, visit www.skanfest.org, call the Festival office at (315) 685-7418 or just stop by (97 East Genesee St., in the basement of the beautiful Presbyterian Church).
inspired by poems about Central New York By Melinda Johnson, Arts Editor Composer Carter Pann visits Skaneateles for the first time this week and is curious about the lakeside village's tempo. Pann knows a little something about the region after reading poems describing its lakes, music, musicians, summertime and life in Central New York. Earlier this year, he read 15 poems, finalists from the more than 100 submitted in a contest organized by the Skaneateles Festival. The poems served as inspiration for a fest-commissioned composition by Pann, who is based in Boulder, Colo. "Summer Songs," the title of the piece, will premiere Friday at the music fest. Five of the poems (see below) struck a chord, so to speak, with Pann. He set two parameters for his final selection. "Will these poems go together as a set nicely and could I order them in a way that would translate musically, in good musical order," he says during a phone interview. And "the poems, something about them had to jump off the page pretty immediately for me to want to set the gist of them to music." Read more at Syracuse.com
By Caroline Manring Skaneateles, NY -- One of the greatest pleasures of my life was playing viola in a pretty darn good amateur string quartet. We hadn't just learned the piece: We'd studied each other for a whole semester, from the way we breathed to our individual internal tempos. We tugged on each other, intermingled and finally became a new entity altogether, like space debris accreting to make a new planet. OK, maybe not Jupiter, exactly, seeing as the group was comprised of computer engineers and English majors, but a planet nonetheless (maybe a smaller planet, or a demoted one -- maybe Pluto). In any case, when you can "try on" the psyches of others in this way, share in their presence to the extent that you inhabit their experience as well as your own, your reality blasts open and becomes huge, both in scope and depth. Thank you, chamber music. Read more at Syracuse.com
By Caroline Manring During my first notable encounter with the Skaneateles Festival I was mostly naked. OK, I was a toddler in a diaper on a hot summer evening. Apparently I squirmed free of my parents and began to dance, I think with my bottle in hand -- as soulfully, soberly and balletically as a toddler can -- to violinist Andres Cardenes' rendering of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons," right below him on the Brook Farm porch (my grandparents' porch). My horrified mother tried to recover me, to put an end to the disruption, but to her great surprise, other listeners stopped her. They saw that someone, however small, was as moved as they were by the music. They wanted the scene to continue. It's unusual, I think, to begin a discussion about a music festival's first week, or any other news story for that matter, in the first person, and mostly unclothed at that. But the Skaneateles Festival is no ordinary phenomenon, nor is my acquaintance with it. For 30 years now the Skaneateles Festival has charmed and transformed its listeners (as well as its performers, volunteers, employees -- its entire family), and for 27 of those years I've been around to witness and take part in it. Andres isn't the only longtime festival friend, of course: There are dozens of musicians, founders and listeners who remember the festival as it was in its own infancy at Library Hall. The concerts started out small but promising -- full of the energy that has never since faltered. Michelle LaCourse was a graduate student in viola in 1985 when she met Lindsay Groves, a festival founder and "whirlwind of ideas and excitement." LaCourse remembers feeling extremely shy and insecure in those days, having come to her instrument relatively late in life for a classical musician (during her ripe, old teenaged years). But Groves paid this no mind, and ever since LaCourse filled in for someone (whom she fervently thanks for not being able to make it) that summer of 1985, she's felt the pull of the lake, the picnics, the close friends and the music in Skaneateles. She recollects how her heart raced as she neared the end of her drive to the little town -- here was summer, here was the very heart of it. So many people have a very similar, if not the exact same, story to tell: starting out young and insecure, feeling the waters (both literally and figuratively) in a tiny town on a lake, and blossoming with it, through it, because of it, beyond it, and, this year, back to it. Current festival co-artistic directors, wife-and-husband dynamic duo Elinor Freer and David Ying, have laid out a feast of living memories for us during the first week of the festival's 30th season, titled "Musical Memories." LaCourse will get to make the drive again, toting her viola, to come play with other longtime, then-and-now friends, including cellists Steven Doane and Rosemary Elliott, oboist Peggy Pearson, bassoonist Greg Quick, clarinetist Deborah Chodacki, violinists Mark Kaplan and Renata Artman Knific, and bassist Ed Castilano. Nearly as alive as the people in our memories is the music: Programming during the first week of the festival will include many of the pieces we feel nostalgic about -- at least as listeners. I tried to get some of the musicians I know to tell me how they miss the pieces they once played, too, but as it turns out, most of them really live for the moment, expressing a great fondness for pieces they've played in the past that's nonetheless outweighed by an excitement for the present and future stage. Andres Cardenes says the only thing he feels the loss of from those early years is the complete freedom: as a young performer he could concentrate entirely on his music, while now he has a wife and children as well as a full-fledged career. He, like so many others, celebrates these developments, whatever the attention they demand, because they've made him a fuller person and therefore a better player -- someone capable of bringing the depth of thought and feeling cultivated by these major life events to his music. Longtime festival friends and performers will bring their new breadth and depth of emotion and skill to the stage as they play such pieces as Mozart's Quintet for Piano and Winds in E flat major and Dvorak's Piano Quartet No. 1 (Thursday), Haydn's Divertimento in E flat and Beethoven's "Archduke" Trio (Friday), and Beethoven's Septet in E flat major and Bach's Concerto for Oboe and Violin in C minor (Saturday). And so, just as the musicians who have come to the Skaneateles Festival have blossomed, the festival itself has grown immensely. Yet not once has the spirit of the small, eager gathering at Library Hall been left behind by the now world-class phenomenon. In fact, I see it as uncanny and quintessentially "Skanfest" that my own sister, who also grew up among the visiting performers and is now a classical singer, will be performing on this first Saturday evening of the festival's 30th season -- weather providing, from her own grandparents' porch -- Bach's heavenly Cantata No. 51. The Skaneateles Festival, then and now, is a legacy embodied. To purchase individual tickets, week or season passes, to get more information, or see a full schedule of events, visit www.skanfest.org, call the festival office at 315-685-7418 or just stop by 97 E. Genesee St., in the basement of the beautiful Presbyterian Church. You'll probably encounter a young, budding musician-intern there who will be happy to get you those tickets. Manring is a granddaughter of Skaneateles Festival co-founders David and Louise Robinson.
Watch the Parker Quartet with Co-Artistic Director David Ying on Bridge Street with Carrie Lazarus
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